CORNWALL SOMERSET & WALES

We’ve had a busy and varied week at our little place in the Cotswolds. Last Wednesday we welcomed two friends from our time in North Melbourne, Peter and Del. It’s always a pleasure to see old friends again, and we showed them around the local sights. We walked the length of Crown Farm and enjoyed cream teas and other English things. We took them to Blenheim Palace (our third visit) and they took us to dinner at our local pub, the Swan.
Peter and Del left us on Friday, heading up north.
On Saturday Fritha and Anthony came down for lunch (at the Swan again) and we drove down to Lower Slaughter, that picturesque village near here, with a mill stream and a water wheel, (and more cream teas.)
On Sunday we packed up and headed south to Cornwall. The weather was pretty crummy with more showers than sunshine, but the drive down to Cornwall was uneventful. Our first stop was in a village called Illogan where we visited the parish cemetery. There in one quiet corner are two rows of war graves, set in immaculately trimmed lawns with a large cross looking down on the gravestones. One of these bears the name of an uncle of Barbara’s who was attached to the RAF during WW2 and died not long after she was born. A cousin of hers had been to visit the grave a few weeks ago and Barbara was keen to visit it also.
This quiet cemetery was mostly overgrown, preserved that way to provide sanctuary for birds, with creepers and grasses almost obscuring the gravestones. Only this memorial to fallen airmen from Canada and Poland, New Zealand and of course Australia, stood out among the tumble of old graves and tombs.
We drove on to the coast and peered through squalls of rain at the looming view of St Michael’s Mount across the bay. The former monastery stands a few hundred metres off the seafront town of Marazion. It was getting late by now so we headed off to the old mining town of Redruth where we’d booked in at a B & B. We found it in a very dull street in a very dull town. These were streets of houses in rows of grey stone with a pub on the corner and here and there a shop or a car yard. Our landlady was pleasant enough but fitting in well with the dull streets and the dull houses. She told us we could get a good dinner at a pub called the Plume of Feathers, just down the road. “Just down the Road” turned out to be a fifteen minute walk against a biting wind. The “good dinner” turned out to be something called “New York Chicken”, a chicken breast with bacon and a thick layer of melted cheese on top. And of course, chips!
We slept well enough and the next morning saw us driving back to Marazion with the aim of crossing to St Michael’s Mount.
The town itself consists of winding narrow streets with rows of those oh so British seaside guest houses and hotels looking out across a wide sandy beach. All of this, when we visited, was looking pretty grim, with the sand hard packed by rain, and little groups of summer holiday makers wandering along the sea front huddled under brollies.
You can walk across to the mount on a causeway but only at low tide, so we took a boat for the five minute voyage to the little harbour on the other side.
Once ashore, we looked up to the old monastery looking down from what seemed thousands of feet. And the only way up was by a long winding flight of stone steps. We took it in easy stages, stopping every now and then to catch our breath and to look back at the view of the harbour and the mainland. Once at the top we came to a broad approach to the building with battlements and cannons looking out over the water. It’s a long time since the place has been a monastery. The history of the building dates from Saxon times when there was some sort of religious settlement here.
Even before that there was a trading port exporting tin and copper to Europe as early as 400 BC.
The early buildings gave way to the beginnings of a monastic building with a chapel and so on in the eleventh century after the Norman Conquest, and you can see that in the towers and rooms that survive today. The transition to a castle started a hundred years later and was completed when Henry the eighth dissolved the monasteries in the sixteenth century. Given its position facing the open sea, it was an ideal lookout in case of invaders, and it was here they lit the first beacon flames to warn of the approaching Spanish Armada.
The building was eventually given to the St Aubyn family who still live there today, although the place is run by the National Trust. We spent a couple of hours exploring the rooms and the towers and turrets which look down hundreds of feet to a rocky shore. Between the seaward walls and the water’s edge, there are terraced gardens of salt resistant plants and flowers, which help to break the otherwise grim exterior. After coffees down by the harbour, we took the boat back to Marazion and set off along the coast to our next destination. Despite the weather, the drive was an endless delight with country lanes so narrow we needed to venture forward only in low gear. It was like progressing through an almost continuous green tunnel of forest trees and hedgerows, occasionally broken by little villages with thatched cottages and pubs.
We pulled into a small parking area below a place called Chysauster. We walked up a long slope across heath and grassy fields to this site. Chysauster is a group of stone walls laid out in circles, and 2000 years ago people lived here in a unique settlement, farming cattle and growing crops.
The walls are all that is left of what were called courtyard houses, a design which allowed the occupants to live in thatched rooms with their animals sheltered in the centre. There’s only one other settlement like this in Europe.
On we travelled again, down country lanes, turning north up the west coast of Cornwall and past more places with names beginning with Tre, Pol and Pen as most places in this region are.
We stopped in one seaside town and bought two huge pasties for lunch. This uniquely Cornish concoction is nothing like the pasties we are used to. They’re twice as big and stuffed with a delicious mix of potato and vegetable chunks and minced beef. They came fresh out of the baker’s oven and left us well sated.
Our next stop was the town of Tintagel, site of the legendary King Arthur’s Castle. If you ever get the chance, don’t bother.
This is one of those over commercialised places with shops full of junky tourist tatt and greasy takeaway food. The castle ruins are a long way down a very steep path which we decided not to tackle. (We’d been there 30 years ago.) We left it to the hoards of coach tourists who thronged every inch of footpath space and spilled out from pub doorways and shops.
We did look into the “Old Post Office”, a rickety old building with a sagging slate roof.
Before it became a post office this was a fourteenth century minor manor house. It’s been refurnished by the National Trust with a mish-mash of historic furniture.
It started raining then, so after a cup of coffee in an overheated cafe, we took off again, driving north into Somerset.
Again, another memorable drive, but for different reasons! We had a hundred mile drive to our next B & B and so we took a major road, putting the foot down. Then we spotted a holdup ahead with a police officer directing traffic. We never found out what the problem was but it meant we had to turn off the highway and take to the byways again. Once more we drove through beautiful lanes with overhanging trees and twisting and turning all the way. A few vehicles ahead of what was now a convoy, was a huge semi trailer and we were concerned that he’d get jammed and we’d all have to back up for miles. At one point we came to the brow of a very steep hill and plunged down the gradient until we reached a tiny little fishing village, with a harbour at the bottom. Then we climbed back up the hill on the other side, and at last back onto the main road. Our route took us up into the Exmoor National Park, a mixture of open heath and valleys with forest and little streams running through them.
It was after eight when we reached the town of Minehead, a flourishing tourist centre, and checked into our B & B. Our landlady recommended a place for dinner, provided we hurried.
This time we enjoyed a good meal of steak and a bottle of Australian shiraz, and we could relax. Despite a few hiccups, it had been a lovely day.
In the morning, and refreshed, we took off again, through more of Somerset, stopping once in a while to take photos of this glorious countryside. And then we crossed the magnificent Severn Bridge and into Wales, where all the road signs come in two languages. We followed the English ones to Tintern, site of the famous Tintern Abbey.
We were early enough to beat the tour coaches which rolled up a little later. We had been here back in the seventies when you could just stop by the roadside and wander in. Now you can only enter the site by paying a fee and walking through the inevitable souvenir shop. Still, the remains of the Abbey are beautifully cared for.
The first buildings appeared here in the twelfth century under the aegis of the Cistercian monks. It became a ruin thanks to Henry the eighth and what’s left stands in a wooded valley with forest rising above the stone arches and towers which are built of lichen covered local reddish stone. We bought a guidebook which identified each section of this extensive building, from the huge Abbey church, its nave and transepts, to the refractory, the infirmary and the abbot’s chapel.
We explored it all for an hour before pressing on once more into Monmouthshire and more glorious green vistas of patchwork fields and woods!
Our last stop before turning for home was the town of Abergavenny...remember the Marty Wilde song..”Taking a trip up to Abergavenny, hoping the weather is fine.”
Well the weather wasn’t that fine, nor was the town really but it did provide us with lunch (Welsh Rarebit of course), and a chance to hear something of that delightful lilting Welsh accent.
The streets were crowded once again with coach loads of tourists, so many of them fat women with fat husbands and fat children.
But none of that could spoil a wonderful trip through what must surely be some of the most beautiful parts of this country.